Everyday Alchemy | A Group Exhibition
February 6 - March 1, 2025
First Thursday: February 6, 2025, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Everyday Alchemy
A Group Exhibition
Hunter Braithwaite
Bonnie Bronson
Ann Hamilton
Malia Jensen
Isaac Layman
Don Nice
Jess Perlitz
Robert Rauschenberg
Mark R. Smith
Donald Sultan
Featuring ten artists, Everyday Alchemy brings together a selection of works that draw inspiration from things we interact with on a daily basis, whether that is evident in the content of the work or in the materials used to create it. Cardboard boxes, mud, and clothing, among other items, serve as the source material to which these artists apply their magic, transmuting the mundane into the extraordinary.
This exhibition includes Malia Jensen’s surreal reimagining of a lightbulb, Bonnie Bronson’s masterful, minimal constructions that reveal themselves to be made of humble cardboard upon closer inspection, Isaac Layman’s perfectly composed portraits of an Amazon box or refrigerator, and Mark R. Smith’s assembly of vinyl and clothing, which draws its form from the original layout of the World Trade Center.
Hunter Braithwaite (b. 1986) lives in New York. He received his MFA from New York University and his BA from the College of William and Mary. He has exhibited with Embajada in San Juan. A longtime arts writer and editor, he has curated numerous exhibitions, and has lectured at the School of Visual Arts and Sotheby's Institute of Art.
Bonnie Bronson was born in Portland, Oregon in 1940 and attended the Portland Art Museum School (now PNCA, Pacific Northwest College of Art) from 1959-61. Bronson exhibited actively throughout the Northwest, including a one-person exhibition at the Portland Art Museum (1979) and several exhibitions at Marylhurst College in Marylhurst, Oregon. Bronson was commissioned for several permanent artworks at prominent businesses and institutions throughout Oregon, and received the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 1978. Following her death in 1990, the Bonnie Bronson Fund was created, awarding an annual prize to a regional artist since 1992. She was honored by a major retrospective at PNCA in 2011.
Ann Hamilton is internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, collective voice, communities past and of labor present. Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal for the Arts, the MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hamilton represented the United States in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world including a museum-wide installation at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) in 2015 and 1992. Her work is included in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), among many others.
Malia Jensen lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues and institutions including the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Melbourne, Australia), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (Milwaukee, WI), Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, AZ), Marian Goodman Gallery (London, England), Richard Gray Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Cristin Tierney Gallery (New York, NY). She has been an Artist in Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Captiva, FL), Ucross Foundation (Clearmont, WY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and the Portland Garment Factory (Portland, OR); and a visiting artist and speaker at Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA), Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR), and Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston, MA). She has completed numerous public commissions in the Northwestern United States, and her work is held in many public and private collections. Jensen has been represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 2006.
Isaac Layman is a photographer who consistently pushes the limits of how an image can be constructed while using his immediate domestic surroundings as subject matter. Layman has exhibited at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX) and Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), among others. He was awarded the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum and the Contemporary Northwest Art Award from the Portland Art Museum. His work is in many collections including the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse (Miami, FL), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, MN).
Don Nice grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, immersed in tales of outlaws and frontier life from his grandfather, a physician and gold miner. His childhood on the range instilled in him a deep connection to nature, which later influenced his art. Encouraged by his grandfather and aunt, both amateur painters, Nice pursued painting alongside athletics, earning a football scholarship to USC. After teaching art and serving in the U.S. Army, where he worked as an illustrator, he studied painting in Rome on the G.I. Bill. In Florence, he was profoundly influenced by Oskar Kokoschka, who taught him to truly "see" as an artist. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism after viewing The New American Paintings in Paris, he returned to the U.S., teaching in Minneapolis before enrolling at Yale’s graduate painting program in 1962. There, he studied among influential artists like Chuck Close and Nancy Graves, but it was Alex Katz’s emphasis on personal experience and subject matter that shaped his distinctive style, which continues to evolve today.
Jess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, Canada, she is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Socrates Sculpture Park in NY, Cambridge Galleries in Canada, De Fabriek in The Netherlands, and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines, a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was primarily a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance. Rauschenberg received numerous awards during his nearly 60-year artistic career. Among the most prominent were the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008.
Mark R. Smith’s current studio practice involves use of recycled textiles which he incorporates into labor-intensive, densely patterned motifs that reference communal architecture, crowd dynamics and the behavioral aspects of social organisms. His work has been featured in institutions across the US including the Portland Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, OH) and the Zimmerly Art Museum, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). His solo exhibitions include The Office of the Governor (Salem, OR), Gallery Hlemmur (Rykjavik, Iceland), The Art Gym Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR) and several at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, OR where his work is represented. Smith has also received many public commissions, including projects with Trimet, Providence Hospital and the Port of Portland (all Portland, OR). His work is included in several public and private collections, including the American Embassy (Accra, Ghana), CityArts Inc. (New York, NY), King County Public Art Collection, Meta (Seattle, WA), Lewis and Clark College (Portland, OR), and Nike Inc. (Beaverton, OR). Smith received his BFA from the Cooper Union (1983) and his MFA from Portland State University (1997).
Donald Sultan is one of the leading American contemporary still life artists. He currently lives and works in New York. Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. The work of Donald Sultan is voluminous and varied. Since his first one-man show in 1977, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His extensive body of work has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art, where he has become best known for his ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday's artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach that is unique.